Key facts
Switching away from Chrome is one of the best privacy upgrades you can make, and Brave is a very good starting point. It uses Chromium under the hood so it will feel very familiar to Chrome, but without Google tracking everything you're doing.
The Chromium back-end is worth noting. Brave is built on the same base as Chrome, which means it’s fast, compatible with virtually every website, and supports Chrome's library of extensions. It also means Google still has the say over the underlying technology. Google discontinued support for Manifest V2 extensions in July 2025, severely limiting the power of ad blockers. If you don't want any of Google's influence, Firefox would be the stronger choice. It runs on Mozilla's own engine, called Gecko, and has absolutely no Google back-end code.
Brave's built-in ad and tracker blocker is genuinely good. It blocks third-party ads and trackers by default, upgrades connections to HTTPS where possible, and offers fingerprinting protection. You don’t need uBlock Origin on top of it, though I would recommend still adding it to catch what the built-in blocker misses.
A couple more things to note before you switch. Brave has a crypto rewards program called BAT that’s on by default in some regions. You can ignore it entirely but I would recommend just turning it off. Also, the default search engine is set as Brave Search, which is good, but still not quite at the level of DuckDuckGo or Kagi(paid). But this is easy to switch in the options as well.
All of the being said, for someone coming from Chrome who wants better privacy with zero friction, Brave is where to start.
